Data communications is becoming increasing important in today's society. Many media exist for transmitting data, including the airways, cable, and telephone lines. As technology develops, these types of media may be used in new ways. For example, video data, such as television, has traditionally been transmitted over either cable or the airways. However, technology enhancements may allow such transmissions to occur in a viable fashion over telephone lines. One problem associated with transmitting video or other types of data over telephone lines is addressing how to transmit data to multiple locations, referred to herein as multicasting.
One format for communicating data is asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) format. Many other formats exist. According to one technique, an ATM switch addresses multicasting by identifying a data cell as a multicast cell and then making multiples copies of the cell. The multiple copies are stored in memory and transmitted separately at an appropriate time to each destination. A problem with this approach is that transmitting multiple copies of data is time-consuming and contributes to switch latency.